New warship building facility coming up outside Mumbai

Shiv Kumar
Tribune News Service
Mumbai, June 14

A new warship building facility will soon come up outside Mumbai with the Maharashtra government fast-tracking allotment of 30 hectares of land to the state-owned Mazgaon Docks Ltd (MDL), according to sources here.

State government officials said the land at Nhava in Navi Mumbai across the Mumbai harbour which was reclaimed in the 1970s was originally earmarked for port related activities. 

"It has however remained in the state government's possession all these years," an official said. 

Paperwork for transferring the land from the state government to MDL is now almost complete, the official added.

Sources say, MDL will be required to obtain environmental clearances after which it may start construction of facilities required for building warships at Nhava.

MDL, which is located in South Mumbai, has been facing severe capacity constraints which hampered the public sector enterprise from timely execution of orders received from the Indian Navy and the Coast Guard.

The company has an order book of more than Rs 53,000 crores in hand, according to a recent disclosure made by it to the media.

In its draft red herring prospectus filed with the stock exchanges ahead of the initial public offering last year, MDL it planned to build a greenfield shipyard at Nhava. Among the facilities being planned here include a ship-repair facility, workshops and dry docks.

“The planned new yard will have a ship-lift, wet basin, workshops, stores and buildings and a ship-repair facility ..... which we believe will be suitable for construction and repair of warships and commercial ships with larger dimensions," MDL said ahead of the listing of its shares.

According to MDL, without the greenfield shipyard its ability to undertake projects would have been severely limited.

Among the orders MDL presently has include five Scorpene-class submarines, four ‘P-15B’ destroyers, and four ‘P-17A’ stealth frigates for the Indian Navy.